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Attending networking events is a fantastic way to advance your career, but too many are awkward and boring. At traditional cocktail-and-nametag events, attendees will too often end up having a few drinks and heading home early because they can’t get an interesting conversation started.

“I’ve been to thousands of pretty crappy networking dinners that were paid for by some bank,” said David Olk, a Techstars mentor and cofounder of ShopKeep, for which he helped raise nearly $100 million. “There’s no format, and I don’t even know who’s there, and I’m kind of like, ‘How did I wind up here?’ ”

Olk has a passion for connecting people, and he wanted to create a more fun and natural way to build business relationships. To solve the problem, he cofounded Voray, which approaches networking like a private dinner party rather than a social mixer.

Voray was founded in January of 2016 and continues to grow, currently hosting around 20 dinners each month in New York City. In my interview with David Olk, he explained what makes Voray special and how he plans to expand its influence in the future.

More “Dinner Party,” Less “Networking Event”

A Voray event is a private dinner of around 12–20 people. It’s funded by someone looking to make connections in an industry, hosted by an influencer in that industry, and organized by the team at Voray.

Here’s how it works. A sponsor, often a representative from an influential company or a thought leader in their industry, informs Voray they’d like to arrange a dinner and describes the type of people they’d like to meet. If Voray agrees to organize the event, they contact a host in their network who is familiar with the sponsor’s industry and ask them to attend the dinner.

The host’s job, should they accept, is to reach out to their own network and invite friends and colleagues who work in the sponsor’s industry. The host is responsible for vetting their guestlist to ensure everyone will be a good fit and add value for the other guests.

The results of these dinners, called “Vorays,” has been very encouraging.

“Every single person that attends one of our events comes back to the platform to interact with everybody else,” Olk said. “On our platform, you’re connected with everyone you’ve been to a Voray with. There are people who have been to ten Vorays, hosted two, sponsored one, and they have a social graph on Voray they continue to interact with.”

When someone is invited to their first Voray, they will be unfamiliar with the concept but more willing to accept an invitation from the host—who is typically a close friend or colleague—than they would be if they were invited by a large company or organization. And after someone has already attended one Voray, their open rate of subsequent invitation emails is 100%.

Small Fish in a Big Pond

Voray hopes to grow the reach of their events, eventually expanding to other cities. They raised $4 million in January and continue to grow their network of sponsors, hosts, and attendees in pursuit of this goal.

It could be difficult for Voray to garner attention in the shadow of more established events by NY Tech Meetup, Startup Grind, and the NYC Business Networking Group, to name a few. The intimate, exclusive nature of Voray dinners could also put them at a disadvantage by limiting the total number of people reached.

Nevertheless, Olk believes Voray has potential to grow because it’s held in such high esteem by past attendees. With time and dedication, Voray could make their dinners popular outside of the traditional networking scene, but it will still be awhile before they can compete with the events of big-name organizations.

Despite these obstacles, Olk is confident his team is facilitating more authentic business connections that represent the way forward for networking.

“I think we’re coming back to a place in our society where people are hungry for real, direct interaction, respect for each other, making commitments, and doing business the way it used to be done, which is in person,” Olk said.

Matt Hunckler is the founder of Powderkeg, a community of tech entrepreneurs and investors. Learn how to grow your business, sign up for his newsletter here.

Within the last decade, I’ve played most positions in the great game of business. In addition to helping high-profile companies grow and scale, I started several of my own, including Powderkeg—a national community with thousands of entrepreneurial members. As a young man la...